Time Machine

Homebrew - Mac IPA

I brewed this because my football game got cancelled and it was what I could put together from our local homebrew shop. Made to cheer myself up and not with a lot of thought. I called it MAC after MacGyver because we was always making things up on the spur of the moment. I was interested in the inclusion of oak chips since I had never tried that before. I was also super excited to dry hop with whole leaf hops since I had never had access to the before, a benefit of buying from the local homebrew shop.

Brew day was pretty straight forward with nothing interesting to report. Sanitizing oak chips was an extra step but was easy to do. When I racked it into the secondary you could really taste something from the oak chips but sadly but after dry hopping the hell out of it it was hard to pick that flavor back out. When it came time to rack it into the bottling bucket I sanitized some cheese cloth around the racking cane to try and keep some of the floating hops out. This worked well and did not clog the cane.

Ingredients

1lb Crystal 2 Row Barley

6.6lb Amber Liquid Malt Extract

1oz Pilgrim Pellet Hops

1oz First Gold Pellet Hops

2oz Cascade Whole Leaf Hops

0.5oz Heavy Toasted Oak Chips

1 pack Muntons Dry Ale Yeast

Method

Boil 1/2 pint of water in a kettle and put it in a pint glass to cool.

I did not get round to writing a review until August after I had drunk most of them so the one I am drinking today had been in the bottle for 3 months. It came out a bit lively, you could really hear the CO2 when the cap popped,but the beer did not gush out of the bottle. The head retention was good with bubbles a mixture of big and small. Had a good balance of hop to malt and smelt quite malty. Had no 'green beer' or other weird homebrew taste. Over all it is a very nice IPA but I think it could do with more malt and more hops during the boil. The dry hopping amount feels about right and you can pick that flavor out. I don't think I will use wood chips again if I am going to dry hop, I think I'll try and keep wood chips as an alternate for dry hopping and try it not with an IPA.